Conquering Fear by Harold Kushner

Author:Harold Kushner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307266644
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2009-10-06T10:00:00+00:00

I think back to that young woman in the Copenhagen synagogue, to the underlying fear that led to her question as to whether God would let humanity destroy itself. I realize today that what I should have told her was that she was asking the wrong question. The destruction of humanity will never be an act of God. The real questions are, first, will human beings realize the awesome magnitude of their power to do harm on a scale hitherto unimagined, and will their inability to control their rage lead them to let destruction loose on our world? And second, if, God forbid, that were to happen and only a saving remnant was left behind, would God give them the wisdom and the courage He gave the children of Noah, to be inspired by a vision of a world rebuilt, a world worth living in and bringing children into? And would the survivors do what needs to be done to give birth to such a world?

The prophet Habakkuk lived in a time of catastrophe. He saw his homeland overrun and God’s Temple in Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonian army. All around him, people’s vision of the future was colored more by fear than by hope. But he was nevertheless able to look beyond that time of devastation and see a future worth working for. He defined the essence of faith in just seven words (three words in the original Hebrew): “the righteous shall live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). I would paraphrase his statement to mean: The righteous person translates his faith into life. He does not fear the future. He testifies to his faith that this is a world we can live in, despite what we have gone through, not only by his own life but by generating the lives that will one day create that future world.

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